Perhaps in response
to yesterday's rebuttal of Hoffman's article on the Pentagon
attack, we received the following from a reader:

Below is what Mike Ruppert has had to say about the
Pentagon 911 mess. If you could, please set the record
straight on this, even if you disagree with his chosen
course (and I don't think Ruppert is above reproach
or not to be questioned, BTW, so thank you for airing
the question of just who his backers are and what their
agenda might be...):

"More than thirty-five times now, and in nine
countries, I have lectured on 9/11. The average attendance
at the lectures has been between 400 and 500 people.
In an estimated sixty-five per sent of those lectures,
in question and answer sessions lasting sometimes up
to three hours I have been asked why I don't pursue
the physical evidence inconsistencies of 9/11. At least
9,100 people have heard me say something like:

"I don't for a minute believe that an airliner
hit the Pentagon. And no one has ever seen a video of
an airliner hitting the Pentagon because there isn't
one. [...] But if I, with some measure of journalistic
credibility, and my readers on Capitol Hill and in universities
start writing stories about these things, I wind up
in either a journalistic suicide mission, or in the
improbable place of having to explain where the airliner
that didn't hit the Pentagon went or how the towers
were brought down. There is a mountain of physical evidence
that blows the government story in my mind, but my experience
says that it will never penetrate the consciousness
of the American people in a way that will bring about
change. What will penetrate, from my experience, is
taking non-scientific reports that most people instantly
accept as credible, whether news reports or government
statements or documents, and merely showing that they
are lies. That opens the wedge, and removes any reliance
upon expert or scientific testimony which is typically
used to confuse simple facts. From there, you can begin
to show people all the other documentary evidence of
foreknowledge, planning and participation."

The "straightening of the record" then is that
Ruppert does not believe that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon
but he feels that the evidence for the fact that no plane
hit the Pentagon is not strong enough. For Ruppert, the
problem with the evidence is twofold. Firstly, as he states
in his book "Crossing the Rubicon":

I have never believed that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
I also chose not to pursue it in my newsletter because
I couldn't prove it by the rigorous standards of either
the law courts or by peer-reviewed forensic science."
(P. 351)

So the issue is that while the evidence that "no
plane hit the Pentagon" does exist, i.e. there is
no evidence that a plane hit the Pentagon - other than
the conflicting and largely biased "eyewitness"
reports that Hoffman bases his flimsy argument on - Ruppert
feels that such evidence would not allow him to make a
convincing case in a court of law. We have asked it before
and we will ask it again now: "what planet is Mike
living on?". Does Mike really believe that he was
ever going to have his "day in court" with Bush,
Cheney, Rumsfeld et al in the dock? Mike presents himself
as a seasoned investigative reporter with years of experience
in uncovering government-sponsored drug running etc.,
yet he is either unaware that the American justice system
is but a arm of the same US government that was complicit
in the 9/11 attacks, or he is deliberately giving false
hope to his followers.

Secondly, Ruppert, like Hoffman, makes the argument that
anyone that pursues the "no plane hit the Pentagon"
line of inquiry will be forced to then explain what happened
to Flight 77. Again we disagree with this assertion. Our
job is to present the case for "the prosecution",
central to which is the lack of evidence that a boeing
757 impacted the Pentagon on 9/11 and is best summed up
by our "Pentagon Strike" Flash presentation.

While we can offer hypotheses, it is NOT our job to definitively
answer the question as to what happened Flight 77 if it
did not hit the Pentagon, it IS the responsibility of
the US government to answer that question. Of course the
US government will not answer that question willingly,
and it can refuse indefinitely to acknowledge any of the
accusations levelled against it so long as only a tiny
"fringe" section of the population are making
the demands. While it is not our main objective, it is
possible however that if enough of the American population
can be shocked out of their government media-induced ignorance
and apathy about the problems with the official version
of 9/11 events, there may yet be some degree of calling
to account.

Due to the fact that the general public has been repeatedly
bombarded with the lies that make up the official version
of events, we realise that we are fighting an uphill battle.
We do not possess the massive exposure that the US government
enjoys via the mainstream media, yet despite this, people
like Hoffman have no problem admonishing us for not making
the case for the government by citing the "eyewitness"
reports of a 757 hitting the Pentagon made by people who
are more than likely government agents.

We are talking about a conspiracy and a cover up of massive
proportions involving many different people in high-level
positions spanning many branches of the federal government,
yet Hoffman is happy to cite
"eyewitness" reports from Military and Navy
personnel within the Pentagon itself, along with such
"reliables" as the ex executive editor of USA
today and Bobby Eberele, the owner of GOP USA a "Conservative"
news site with links to White House rent-boy Jeff Gannon
aka James Guckert! Just for good measure, Hoffman also
cites the testimony of one General Richard Myers, vice-chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that before the
crash into the Pentagon, military officials had been notified
that another hijacked plane had been heading from the
New York area to Washington. Well Heck! if General Myers
(who was very likely one of the key conspirators) said
that a plane hit the Pentagon then it just HAS to be true,
right?! Is Hoffman REALLY posing as a serious 9/11 researcher?
Or is he is just posing?

At the WTC, there were billions of eyewitnesses from
all over the world who saw two planes slam into the towers.
The recovered wreckage leaves no doubt that Flight 93
really did "crash" into a field in Pennsylvania
(although the fact that the debris was strewn across 8
miles strongly suggests that it was shot down, not forgetting
that, in another infamous "slip", Rumsfeld
also confirmed this). There is however, NO hard evidence
that Flight 77 crashed into the facade of the Pentagon.

Of all the evidence pointing to a 9/11 cover-up, and
for the purposes of opening the debate among the general
unbelieving public, the events surrounding the Pentagon
attack presents the best chances of success. Our definition
of "success" does not include the hope that
the conspirators will be hauled up in front of any US
court given that Bush owns a controlling stake in the
US Supreme Court, but rather that the greatest number
of people be exposed to the idea that the official version
of events of 9/11 is in fact a lie. It seems that the
idea of success and how best to achieve it is the crux
of the matter. Hoffman and Ruppert have claimed that the
best way to ensure success is to stick only to those arguments
that will "open the wedge" and "penetrate
the consciousness of the American people" without
presenting any scenarios that are simply too unbelievable
or frightening. Such arguments, they claim, include the
long list of inconsistencies in the official version of
events such as David Ray Griffin delineates in his book
"A New Pearl Harbor".

The problem with this approach is that it belies a fundamental
misunderstanding of the target audience. While it is not
realistic, we will assume that, like us, Ruppert's and
Hoffman's best case scenario is that all 6 billion people
on the planet will be exposed to the evidence for US (and
other) government complicity in 9/11.

While there are no exact figures, it is reasonable to
assume that there are a significant number of people who
have already accepted the idea that the US government
was in some way complicit in the 9/11 attacks. These people
make up the bulk of those who frequent alternative news
and 9/11 research sites like Ruppert's "From The
Wilderness" and Hoffman's "9/11 Review".
Basically, more often than not 9/11 researchers and writers
are preaching to the converted - people who are able to
accept that their government does indeed lie and is capable
of attacking itself for political and personal profit.
The remainder of the population - the vast majority -
is made up of people who ascribe to the official version
of events. It is extremely unlikely that such people,
not being inclined to believe "crazy conspiracy theories"
and already fully believing that "Arab terrorists"
carried out the 9/11 attacks, will sit down and read through
a long list of "documentary evidence of foreknowledge,
planning and participation." From experience we have
come to the conclusion that such people are also viscerally
aware that, if they allow the "wedge" to be
opened even a little, then that wedge will very soon become
a floodgate. For example, if an non-believer is exposed
to and accepts the evidence that Guiliani knew in advance
that the WTC towers were going to fall, how many degrees
of separation are there between the acknowledgement of
that fact and the idea that the US government deliberately
murdered or facilitated the murder of thousands of its
own citizens? Furthermore, in such a scenario, is it any
more difficult for the average citizen to accept that
the government murdered or allowed the murder of its own
citizens in the WTC attacks, than that the same government
"disposed of" the 64 people on Flight 77 after
it didn't hit the Pentagon?

While we understand the value of the lists of "documentary
evidence of foreknowledge, planning and participation",
we do not think that such information is appropriate for
the task of attempting to "open a wedge" with
the average non-believer. For such a task we feel that
a short,
sharp, shock, is much more effective, and we make
no apologies for the fact that it employs some of the
emotionally jarring techniques that have been used to
such great effect by the US government and their media
lackeys in forcing the lie onto the unsuspecting public.
There is a world of difference between shocking the "emotional
center" for the purposes of spreading the truth and
using the same tactics to spread the lie. When the lie
is told, it is presented as truth and therein lies the
deception and manipulation. When the truth is told it
is presented for what it is - the truth.

We are engaged in an information "war" after
all, and there are no rules that say we should not use
all available means to make the truth available to those
who seek it. In fact, it is our responsibilty to do so,
with the proviso that we always strive to maintain rigorous
standards as regards the objectivity of the truth that
we present.

It is not, however, an easy task.

How many times in your life have you successfully convinced
someone with strong opinions to change their mind solely
through an appeal to reason and the data in hand? How
many times have you been convinced through rational argument
to change an idea about which you felt strongly?

It happens rarely, if ever.

There is a reason for this, and it lies in the structure
of our Personality, composed as it is of three "centres":
the motor, the emotional, and the intellectual.

The intellectual centre is the seat of reason and logic.
It is there that we weigh and measure, calculate and identify
relationships between facts, and come to an intellectual
judgment. Were our intellectual centres part of a balanced
system where each centre did its work without the interference
of the others, reason might well be able to convince reason.
However, in the personality as it exists in reality, the
centres are out of balance. Emotional energy is often
used to fuel the intellectual centre, leading to ideas
becoming embedded within emotion, like the stones or gravel
in cement. From the emotional centre comes our passions,
our likes and dislikes, the energy that fuels belief.
Facts and data are not seen for what they are, but for
how they support or undermine that which we want to believe.

When the centres are in balance, the emotional centre
can give force to the facts in order to motivate us to
do, lighting the fire of passion,
but under the sign of objective reality and Truth. When
the centres are in balance, the intellectual centre is
able to work free from the emotion of belief. Data is
aligned in patterns magnetised by truth, seen for what
it is, not as another brick to either build our house
of ideas or throw at the house of another.

But rare are the individuals who have achieved this balance.
The rest of us are machines badly out of synch, misusing
our energy, allowing our fears and hopes, our wishful
thinking and our desire to maintain the illusion to cloud
our ability to judge and calculate. We have a very difficult
time being objective.

When we think using our emotional energy, strong feelings
become attached to our ideas and the data behind them.
Rather than a fluid canvas upon which the raw data can
be arranged and rearranged quickly and easily as new data
enters, permitting new and more accurate patterns of reality
to emerge, emotions work to set the data firmly in place
in a force field of passionate belief. We become fixed
upon a particular interpretation, one pattern out of many,
and we do everything in our power to hold that pattern
in place no matter what new information may arrive. The
idea is set in our personality, fixed, anchored, unable
to budge or be dislodged.

In order to let go of an idea, or of a pattern of data,
of a set belief, the emotional bond holding it in place
must be broken. An emotional shock must be delivered that
overcomes the existing bond, snapping it, disrupting the
force field allowing that which is set in place to float,
to become fluid so that it can be displaced, removed,
or replaced by something new. A shock to the old pattern
is necessary to permit a new pattern to emerge. If enough
shocks are continually delivered to the system over time,
the state of fluidity can become permanent, our thought
processes can learn to remain supple, flexible, ever able
to integrate new data on the fly, in real time. Rather
than seeing the world through a filter of preconceived
patterns, we can learn to continually form new patterns
as we need them, with no need to shock the system to unlearn.

That is one goal of esoteric work.

Among the ideas that are the mostly firmly anchored through
the emotions are those having to do with family and country.
In the United States especially with its patriotic traditions
of the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, with its self-image
as a country that welcomed the world's poor and oppressed
to a new life of individual fulfillment, its strong belief
in its democratic heritage and its pride in its system
of government, the world's longest surviving experiment
in government of the people, by the people, and for the
people, the emotional bonds Americans and their ideas
about their government are very strong and deeply anchored.

To consider that members of that government would intentionally
harm those citizens it was elected through free and democratic
elections to protect is beyond the pale. It is unthinkable
in a very literal sense. The emotions prevent such a thought
from forming. Such an idea cannot exist because the brain,
hardwired through years of socialisation and education
and frozen into place through emotional entrancement,
does not have the circuits to permit it to form. If the
idea is heard, there is nowhere in the mind for it to
lodge, to take root, as if we bit into a fruit whose taste
did not fit the existing receptors in the tongue and nose.

What are the consequences of the reality of emotional
thinking for those who are attempting to get out the truth
about the events of 9/11?

The overwhelming majority of Americans will need a shock
to their system to dislodge the strong hold of the emotional
beliefs around their government, a shock that is strong
enough to break up the pattern of "our government
would never do such a thing" that would permit the
data to shift into a pattern more closely matching the
truth.

The Pentagon
Strike flash animation produced by Signs of the Times
produces such a shock. The photos of the lawn in front
of the Pentagon, pristine after the attack, speak to the
psyche in ways that words and verbal logic can not. The
photos of the Pentagon offices, untouched by the flames,
jar our mental images of the inferno of a plane crash
where, we are told, the fire was so hot it vapourised
the plane.

The Pentagon Strike video is not meant to reach people
through their reason. It is meant to shock their reason
awake by showing the holes and contradictions in the official
version, stirring reason from its lethargy so that the
viewer will follow up and do the research necessary to
build a rational understanding of what happened that day,
an understanding based not upon belief but upon the facts.

It will not work with everyone. Some people's critical
capacities have atrophied to such an extent that it is
doubtful that anything short of a presidential address
by Bush admitting to his complicity would shock them awake...and
even then. How many Americans remained loyal to the crook
Richard Nixon throughout the days of the Watergate investigation?
For certain people, their beliefs are so firm that even
staring the truth in the face, they are unable to renounce
them and recognise that which is.

There are others who have more knowledge about the actual
state of affairs. They know about the history of US interventions
in other countries, carried out in the name of democracy
but for reasons of power, control, and profit. Even if
they have a difficult time believing that people in government
could carry out an operation such as the attacks of 9/11
on their own people, they have enough data to know that
such attacks are routine against the people of other countries.
For some, one shock is all it takes. For others, it may
take the collapse of the economy, an economic 9/11 on
a massive scale where millions of Americans will lose
their jobs, their savings, and their ability to earn a
living while George and the boys continue wining and dining
pseudo-journalists in the White House backrooms, for them
to realise they have been lied to, manipulated, and set
up to take the fall so that the rich can maintain their
lifestyles during the collapse.

The accumulation of data about the "crash"
at the Pentagon, when one excludes eye-witness reports
from members of the military and intelligence communities,
is overwhelmingly weighted against the official story.
Comparison photos of the Pentagon "crash site"
and other crash sites where planes were known to have
crashed is a strong message to the visual cortext that
the data does not compute. The one photo used as evidence
of plane debris on the lawn, the famous photo by Mark
Faram, is not even claimed by the Defence Department as
a piece of an American Airlines jet. There is no physical
evidence that a 757 hit the Pentagon. The photos of the
site are powerful prods from the emotions to reason to
rouse itself from its slumber, so when 9/11 investigators
ignore this data and tell us, like Michael Ruppert, that
there is not the evidence that would hold up in a court
of law, or when Hoffman wants to focus on other issues,
such as the testimony of members of the group that, if
the "conspiracy theorists" are correct, carried
out the attacks, we are forced to wonder what side they
are on. These differences tell us that these researchers
are looking for something other than the truth. They wish
to defend the republic, reclaim the constitution, and,
in Ruppert's case, spread the oil industry's propaganda
about peak oil to prepare us for the "Save Humanity
Raffle" where 2 billion lucky winners will watch
as the other 4 billion inhabitants of the planet commit
a heroic mass suicide so that the horrors of human history
can continue on for a few hundred years more.

The survivors might even erect a plaque in honour of
their sacrifice and their memory.

It is interesting also that, while Ruppert is happy to
dismiss the "no plane at the Pentagon" theory
on the grounds that there is not enough evidence to convincingly
prove it in a court of law, he sees no problem with proclaiming
the reality of "peak oil" despite the fact that
there is NO proof that oil is even a finite fossil fuel.

Why is humanity so important that it must survive? Has
it earned that right to life by its actions over the few
thousand years of written history? If truth is the highest
goal and a life lived defending the truth in a world of
darkness and lies the only noble life, mankind as a whole
is an utter failure.

We do not have Mr. Ruppert's faith in the courts of law,
nor do we think that we must hold off judgment until such
time as unassailable proof comes to the fore. We think
that people must come to their conclusions themselves
based upon the available data. The situation is serious
enough that we cannot wait for the smoking gun to begin
throwing light on the crimes of America's leaders. Proof
does not always exist. In those cases, we must act based
upon the best knowledge that we have at the time, mindful
that new data can permit us to arrive at new hypotheses.
Ridding ourselves of rigid patterns of thought and belief
is imperative, for those calcified thought forms are dams
that block the flow of the force of Creation, diverting
the energy needed for the renewal of the world into paths
leading towards its destruction.

A closed system will be subject to the second law of
thermodynamics. If we are not open to the possibilities
of a limitless universe, the only way we can become open
systems ourselves, then we, too, will be in the hold of
entropy. If we can not break the rigidity of our thought,
imprisoned in our emotions, stoked by fear of our own
mortality, then we will be unable to transduce the Creative
energy.

A bill limiting the rights of debt-ridden
families to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy clears hurdles in
the Senate; the House is expected to approve the bill
early next week.

Mar 9 - The most sweeping overhaul
of bankruptcy legislation in over a quarter century
will likely be signed into law as soon as next week,
after two Senate votes yesterday removed the few remaining
political obstacles.

The new law would require many indebted
individuals filing for bankruptcy to do so under Chapter
13, in which the debtor is required to set up a repayment
plan; instead of Chapter 7, in which some assets are
seized, but debts are erased.

The credit industry heavily backed the bill, arguing
that the changes are needed to prevent people from abusing
the current system. A coalition of credit companies
-- including Visa, MasterCard, the American Bankers
Association, MBNA America, Capital One, Citicorp, the
Ford Motor Credit Company and the General Motors Acceptance
Corporation -- spent more than $40 million in political
fundraising and lobbying for the changes, according
to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a government
watchdog group that tracks money and politics.

CRP also reports that finance
and credit companies donated more that $7.8 million
to political campaigns during the 2004 election cycle.
Sixty-four percent went to Republican candidates
and 36 percent went to Democrats. Additionally, according
to CRP, credit card giant MBNA gave more than $1.5 million
and the American Bankers Association, which is the main
lobbying organization for the banking industry, contributed
more than $2.2 million to candidates and parties.

Supporters of the new bill say increasing numbers of
bankruptcy filings illustrates the need for restrictions.
However, the bill's opponents
contend that the increase is the result of a rise in
debt, often resulting from burdensome medical and education
expenses.

A Harvard University study published
in February in the journal Health Matters found that,
in the two years before filing for bankruptcy, 19 percent
of families went without food, 40 percent lost their
phone service, 43 percent could not afford to fill a
prescription and 53 percent went without vital medical
care. About half of the 1,771 individuals interviewed
for the study cited medical expenses as a cause of their
bankruptcy.

"This bankruptcy bill is mean-spirited and unfair,"
Senator Edward Kennedy, (D-Massachusetts) told
the New York Times. "In anything like its present form,
it should and will be an embarrassment to anyone who
votes for it. It's a bonanza for the credit card companies,
which made $30 billion in profits last year; and a nightmare
for the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak."

In a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee
this February, reported in the Houston Chronicle, Harvard
Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, who opposes the
bill, noted, "A family driven
to bankruptcy by the increased costs of caring for an
elderly parent with Alzheimer's disease is treated the
same as someone who maxed out his credit cards at a
casino." She added, "A person who had a heart attack
is treated the same as someone who had a spending spree
at the shopping mall. A mother who works two jobs and
who cannot manage the prescription drugs needed for
a child with diabetes is treated the same as someone
who charged a bunch of credit cards with only a vague
intent to repay."

The Senate rejected several proposals to tighten bankruptcy
regulations that allow the wealthy to shelter assets
to protect them from being seized during bankruptcy
proceedings. Senators also rejected an amendment that
would have made it more difficult for individuals convicted
of violence while protesting abortion to escape fines
by declaring bankruptcy. The Senate will vote on the
bill as early as today.

House leaders told the New York Times that they expect
to pass the legislation as soon as this week. President
Bush has already said he will sign it.

For more than two years, special-education
teacher Fatemeh Hosseini worked a second job to keep up
with the $2,000 in monthly payments she collectively sent
to five banks to try to pay $25,000 in credit card debt.

Even though she had not used the cards
to buy anything more, her debt had nearly doubled to
$49,574 by the time the Sunnyvale, Calif., resident
filed for bankruptcy last June. That is because Hosseini's
payments sometimes were tardy, triggering late fees
ranging from $25 to $50 and doubling interest rates
to nearly 30 percent. When the additional costs pushed
her balance over her credit limit, the credit card companies
added more penalties.

"I was really trying hard to make minimum payments,"
said Hosseini, whose financial problems began in the
late 1990s when her husband left her and their three
children. "All of my salary was going to the credit
card companies, but there was no change in the balances
because of that interest and those penalties."

Punitive charges -- penalty fees and sharply higher
interest rates after a payment is late -- compound the
problems of many financially strapped consumers, sometimes
making it impossible for them to dig their way out of
debt and pushing them into bankruptcy.

The Senate is to vote as soon as this week on a bill
that would make it harder for individuals to wipe out
debt through bankruptcy. The Senate last week voted
down several amendments intended to curb excessive fees
and other practices that critics of the industry say
are abusive. House leaders say they will act soon after
that, and President Bush has said he supports the bill.

Bankruptcy experts say that too often, by the time
an individual has filed for bankruptcy or is hauled
into court by creditors, he or she has repaid an amount
equal to their original credit card debt plus double-digit
interest, but still owes hundreds or thousands of dollars
because of penalties.

"How is it that the person who wants to do right ends
up so worse off?" Cleveland Municipal Judge Robert J.
Triozzi said last fall when he ruled against Discover
in the company's breach-of-contract suit against another
struggling credit cardholder, Ruth M. Owens.

Owens tried for six years to pay off
a $1,900 balance on her Discover card, sending the credit
company a total of $3,492 in monthly payments from 1997
to 2003. Yet her balance grew to $5,564.28, even though,
like Hosseini, she never used the card to buy anything
more. Of that total, over-limit penalty fees alone were
$1,158.

The bankruptcy measure now being debated in Congress
has been sought for nearly eight years by the credit
card industry. Twice in that time, versions of it have
passed both the House and Senate. Once, President Bill
Clinton refused to sign it, saying it was unfair, and
once the House reversed its vote after Democrats attached
an amendment that would prevent individuals such as
anti-abortion protesters from using bankruptcy as a
shield against court-imposed fines.

Credit card companies and most congressional Republicans
say current law needs to be changed to prevent abuse
and make more people repay at least part of their debt.
Consumer-advocacy groups and many Democrats say people
who seek bankruptcy protection do so mostly because
they have fallen on hard times through illness, divorce
or job loss. They also argue that current law has strong
provisions that judges can use to weed out those who
abuse the system.

Opponents also argue that the
legislation is unfair because it ignores loopholes that
would allow rich debtors to shield millions of dollars
during bankruptcy through expensive homes and complex
trusts, while ignoring the need for more disclosure
to cardholders about rates and fees and curbs on what
they say is irresponsible behavior by the credit card
industry. The Republican majority, along with
a few Democrats, has voted down dozens of proposed amendments
to the bill, including one that would make it easier
for the elderly to protect their homes in bankruptcy
and another that would require credit card companies
to tell customers how much extra interest they would
pay over time by making only minimum payments.

No one knows how many consumers get caught in the spiral
of "negative amortization," which is what regulators
call it when a consumer makes payments but balances
continue to grow because of penalty costs. The problem
is widespread enough to worry federal bank regulators,
who say nearly all major credit card issuers engage
in the practice.

Two years ago regulators adopted a policy that will
require credit card companies to set monthly minimum
payments high enough to cover penalties and interest
and lower some of the customer's original debt, known
as principal, so that if a consumer makes no new charges
and makes monthly minimum payments, his or her balance
will begin to decline.

Banks agreed to the new rules after, in the words of
one top federal regulator, "some arm-twisting." But
bank executives persuaded regulators to allow the higher
minimum payments to be phased in over several years,
through 2006, arguing that many customers are so much
in debt that even slight increases too soon could push
many into financial disaster.

Credit card companies declined to comment on specific
cases or customers for this article, but banking industry
officials, speaking generally, said there is a good
reason for the fees they charge.

"It's to encourage people to pay their bills the way
they said they would in their contract, to encourage
good financial management," said Nessa Feddis, senior
federal counsel for the American Bankers Association.
"There has to be some onus on the cardholder, some responsibility
to manage their finances."

High fees "may be extreme cases, but they are not the
trend, not the norm," Feddis said.

"Banks are pretty flexible," she said. "If you are
a good customer and have an occasional mishap, they'll
waive the fees, because there's so much competition
and it's too easy to go someplace else." Banks are also
willing to work out settlements with people in financial
difficulty, she said, because "there are still a lot
of options even for people who've been in trouble."

Many bankruptcy lawyers disagree. James S.K. "Ike"
Shulman, Hosseini's lawyer, said credit card companies
hounded her and did not live up to several promises
to work with her to cut mounting fees.

Regulators say it is appropriate for lenders to charge
higher-risk debtors a higher interest rate, but that
negative amortization and other practices go too far,
posing risks to the banking system by threatening borrowers'
ability to repay their debts and by being unfair to
individuals.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David H. Adams of Norfolk, who
is also the president of the National Conference of
Bankruptcy Judges, said many debtors who get in over
their heads "are spending money, buying things they
shouldn't be buying." Even so, he said, "once you add
all these fees on, the amount of principal being paid
is negligible. The fees and interest and other charges
are so high, they may never be able to pay it off."

Judges say there is little they can do by the time
cases get to bankruptcy court. Under the law, "the credit
card company is legally entitled to collect every dollar
without a distinction" whether the balance is from fees,
interest or principal, said retired U.S. bankruptcy
judge Ronald Barliant, who presided in Chicago. The
only question for the courts is whether the debt is
accurate, judges and lawyers say.

John Rao, staff attorney of the National Consumer Law
Center, one of many consumer groups fighting the bankruptcy
bill, says the plight consumers face was illustrated
last year in a bankruptcy case filed in Northern Virginia.

Manassas resident Josephine McCarthy's
Providian Visa bill increased to $5,357 from $4,888
in two years, even though McCarthy has used the card
for only $218.16 in purchases and has made monthly payments
totaling $3,058. Those payments, noted U.S. Bankruptcy
Judge Stephen S. Mitchell in Alexandria, all went to
"pay finance charges (at a whopping 29.99%), late
charges, over-limit fees, bad check fees and phone payment
fees." Mitchell allowed the claim "because the debtor
admitted owing it." McCarthy, through her lawyer, declined
to be interviewed.

Alan Elias, a Providian Financial Corp. spokesman,
said: "When consumers sign up for a credit card, they
should understand that it's a loan, no different than
their mortgage payment or their car payment, and it
needs to be repaid. And just like a mortgage payment
and a car payment, if you are late you are assessed
a fee." The 29.99 percent interest rate, he said, is
the default rate charged to consumers "who don't met
their obligation to pay their bills on time" and is
clearly disclosed on account applications.

Feddis, of the banker's association, said the nature
of debt means that interest will often end up being
more than the original principal. "Anytime you have
a loan that's going to extend for any period of time,
the interest is going to accumulate. Look at a 30-year-mortgage.
The interest is much, much more than the principal."

Samuel J. Gerdano, executive director of the American
Bankruptcy Institute, a nonpartisan research group,
said that focusing on late fees is "refusing to look
at the elephant in the room, and that's the massive
levels of consumer debt which is not being paid. People
are living right up to the edge," failing to save so
when they lose a second job or overtime, face medical
expense or their family breaks up, they have no money
to cope.

"Late fees aren't the cause of debt," he said.

Credit card use continues to grow,
with an average of 6.3 bank credit cards and 6.3
store credit cards for every household, according to
Cardweb.com Inc., which monitors the industry. Fifteen
years ago, the averages were 3.4 bank credit cards and
4.1 retail credit cards per household.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the large increase
in cards, there is a "fee feeding frenzy," among credit
card issuers, said Robert McKinley, Cardweb's president
and chief executive. "The whole mentality has really
changed over the last several years," with the industry
imposing fees and increasing interest rates if a single
payment is late.

Penalty interest rates usually are about 30 percent,
with some as high as 40 percent, while late fees now
often are $39 a month, and over-limit fees, about $35,
McKinley said. "If you drag that out for a year, it
could be very damaging," he said. "Late and over-limit
fees alone can easily rack up $900 in fees, and a 30
percent interest rate on a $3,000 balance can add another
$1,000, so you could go from $2,000 to $5,000 in just
one year if you fail to make payments."

According to R.K. Hammer Investment Bankers, a California
credit card consulting firm, banks collected $14.8 billion
in penalty fees last year, or 10.9 percent of revenue,
up from $10.7 billion, or 9 percent of revenue, in 2002,
the first year the firm began to track penalty fees.

The way the fees are now imposed, "people would be
better off if they stopped paying" once they get in
over their heads, said T. Bentley Leonard, a North Carolina
bankruptcy attorney . Once you stop paying, creditors
write off the debt and sell it to a debt collector.
"They may harass you, but your balance doesn't keep
rising. That's the irony."

Comment: Talk about a diabolical
setup! First you ship many of the "living wage"
jobs overseas, so that soaring numbers of people are working
for wages under the true cost of living (if at all).
Then, "Easy Al" of the Fed lowers interest rates to less
than nothing and credit is offered to anyone who breathes
by the financial institutions (of course, those who can't
possibly "make ends meet" take them up on it) to boost
consumption. Then you lower the boom and trap them
forever in a setup where, if they are sincerely are trying
to "pay their debts" as they have been programmed to believe
they must, they are forever trapped in servitude to the
financial elite.

And these are the "lucky ones" who aren't being murdered
for the benefit of and under the true auspices of this
same "financial elite" through their "wars" and various
black ops operations.

It is looking quite grim. And the "hits" just
keep on coming! It is part of a plan to bring the American
population to its knees by milking them of their last
cent so that the likes of Bush and his "base"
can accumulate and even greater share of America's assets.
It is a war, a war that the rich will admit to among
themselves, but which is ignored in the mainstream media.
The fascists in the US have won. They have never forgiven
FDR for the New Deal and used the defeat of Germany
to bring the best Nazi brains "home" in order
to radically reform the US.

Neil Bush, has a $60,000-a-year
employment contract with a top adviser to a Washington-based
consulting firm set up to help companies secure contracts
in Iraq, according to the Nov 11, 2004 Financial Times.

Neil disclosed this employment during a divorce deposition
on March 3, 2003. He testified that he was co-chairman
of the Houston-based, Crest Investment Corporation,
which invests in energy and other ventures, and said
he received $15,000 every three months for a average
3 or 4 hours of work a week doing "miscellaneous
consulting services." "Such as?" his
ex-wife's Attorney asked, "Such
as answering phone calls when Jamal Daniel, the other
co-chairman, called and asked for advice," Neil
answered. [...]

Overall, Crest goes to great lengths to show Neil how
much it values his membership on the team. For instance,
when Neil got remarried in 2004, Daniel held a wedding
reception at his home, and Crest arranged a 5-year rent-free
cottage for Neil and his new bride in Kennebunkport,
Maine, so they could spend time near Mom & Pop Bush
whenever they wanted to.

Another Jackpot - Thanks To Brother W

As usual, during his deposition, Neil forgot to mention
a few facts about his earnings potential with Crest.
First of all, he didn't mention
that he attached his signature to letters soliciting
business for New Bridge in obtaining contracts in Iraq,
and two, that he attached his name as a reference for
an extremely lucrative proposal submitted by Crest to
obtain a lease on a parcel of property located on the
island of Quintana, Texas, that will result in payments
of at least $2 million a year to Crest.

When W took office in 2001, he vowed to make it easier
for companies to build coastline facilities to store
liquefied natural gas (LNG), a cooled and condensed
form of natural gas, shipped in from countries around
the world. [...]

If it could gain approval, the Crest LNG facility would
be the first such facility in Texas, and only one of
a few in the entire country.

The Harbor Commission was so
enthralled with a proposal from Crest, that it offered
the company an all-exclusive lease without soliciting
for any other bids. [...]

To this day, Neil's connection to the firm is not widely
known. However, Saathoff said that when Crest approached
the commission with the project, it provided Neil's
name as a reference. [...]

"Democracies have certain
things in common. They have a rule of law, and protection
of minorities, a free press, and a viable political
opposition." – George W. Bush

Y'know, you've really got to give George credit. There
he was standing next to his ol' pal, "Pootie Poot,"
at a press conference during his recent fence-mending
trip to Europe and he never even cracked a smirk when
he uttered those words. After a private meeting with
the man whose soul Bush had looked into years ago, the
accidental leader of the not-so-free world gently chided
the Russian leader with words so hypocritical –
it was truly astounding. And Bush was actually able
to keep a straight face.

I, on the other hand, sprayed a mouthful of coffee
all over my TV screen. I really hate it when that happens.

Now, I always thought we lived in a democracy, at
least that's what I was always taught in school, but
after listening to Bush's description of democracy that
day I may have to reconsider things. Although
George is big on platitudes when describing "American
values," he seems to be completely oblivious to
fact that he and his administration have made great
inroads towards the destruction of those very things
he was rubbing Putin's face in.

I can't imagine what was going through Vladimir 's
mind - or any other knowledgeable person in that room
- as Bush was rambling on about something he knew nothing
about. Maybe that little saying about people in glass
houses might have come to mind.

Rule of Law?

C'mon, George, give it a rest. You've pretty much
broken every one of the Ten Commandments you keep going
on about.

Your administration has zero respect
for any rule of law. The invasion of Iraq was a violation
of international law. Somebody in the White House broke
a federal law in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
The GAO stated the use of taxpayer money to make and
distribute fake "news" documentaries to further
an agenda was against the law. Torture is against the
law. Arresting people without charge and holding them
indefinitely is against the law. Shall we go on?

This administration has shown more contempt and fear
of the rule of law than it has shown any respect for
it at all - and the rule of law is one of the basic
building blocks upon which the Constitution stands.
From stone-walling the 9/11 investigation to withholding
documentation of Cheney's Energy Commission participants,
the Bush administration has flaunted its disregard of
the rule of law as something that shouldn't apply to
them.

Its attitude is shamefully in full view when it comes
to the horror and bloodshed taking place this very second
in Darfur . In early February, members of the Bush administration
were sneaking around the UN in an effort to block the
prosecution of Sudanese officials responsible for the
continuing slaughter of innocent men, women and children
in that country.

Why? Because these prosecutions would take place in
the International Criminal Court and the Bushies don't
want to legitimize that court.

Why? Because the Bushies are
afraid that, because of their actions, they might be
dragged in front of that court. Of course, they
state that they're concerned about "Americans being
prosecuted," but let's get real. The only "Americans"
they're trying to protect are themselves.

Rule of law, indeed!

And what's all this about the protection
of minorities? Didn't anybody ever tell George that
the only reason he is where he is was due to the suppression
of the minority vote? Remember the purged voters these
last two elections, George? Or the lack of adequate
voting machines in predominantly minority districts?
How about your pledge to change the Constitution to
discriminate against a certain minority group in order
to "save" the marriages of your gullible flock?

The one that really got me was the reference to Russia
's lack of "free press." He shot that one
straight into his good pal Vladimir after the whole
world had enjoyed a few weeks of reports about your
own tax dollars having been used to pay conservative
pundits to do what they would've done for free anyway.
And then – imagine if it
were Clinton – a fake journalist moonlighted as
a gay hooker (er, "escort") using a fake name
and spending two years in the White House press room
lobbing questions as soft as flower petals at Ari, Scott
and George. Meanwhile, the Bush "free press"
has been running willy-nilly away from this story because
the bloggers who did all the work and broke the story
have shown the mainstream corporate media to be the
lazy, pandering mouthpieces they truly are.

And just how "free" can the press be when
the corporations that own them have other interests?

Let's take, for instance, MSNBC.
One of the corporations owning that particular cable
news channel is General Electric. GE expects to have
approximately $3 billion of contract work in Iraq by
the year 2006, much of that being tied to rebuilding
the infrastructure in that country.Now,
if the success in fulfilling the terms of those contracts
is dependent upon the security of Iraq, how tolerant
will GE's shareholders be if a news outlet it owns starts
going on about the insecurity in that country? Talk
about a quagmire. [...]

MSNBC isn't the only culprit. [...]

I guess, in some ways, one could say that we have
a free press. It's free from
any accuracy, journalistic integrity and investigative
talent. Even Bob Woodward had to admit recently
that if Watergate had happened today, Nixon would have
gotten away with it.

Now, about this "viable political opposition"
nonsense – George is really stretching things.
Granted, the lack of opposition is not all George's
fault. Let's face it: the majority
of the so-called opposition has been playing "footsie"
with Bush and the Republicans for over four years now
and any time one dares speak up, the GOP hangs 'em out
to dry and lets the free press beat on 'em for a week
or so.

Of course, it doesn't help matters when you have a
snake like Tom DeLay redrawing voting districts in Texas
(one district looks like a 300 mile bar-bell) and you
have conservative leaders talking about going "nuclear"
on the opposition so they can get even more radical
right-wing judges appointed. The
opposition Bush espoused to Putin that day has pretty
much spent the last four years (in his own back yard)
being squashed like a bug any time one of 'em slips
out from under his faux cowboy boot..

So, in light of the fact that America under King George
wildly contradicts his own description of a democracy,
I really have to wonder just where I live or what system
of government we have now. And
I really have to wonder if Bush is so divorced from
reality (sorry, I couldn't resist) that he actually
believes his statement resembles America today.

If that's the case, I better start keeping a towel
or something near my TV set. There's no telling what
nonsense will come out of his mouth next.

Comment: To
Bush and the Neocons, it doesn't matter if their descriptions
of "American values" or "American democracy"
match up with reality. In their minds, there is no reality
save that which they create themselves. American democracy
can include fascist laws because they say it can. Bush,
Rove, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the rest of the shady bunch
are only concerned with the history they are making
at each step. Their delusions of power - along with
their egos - are so great that they actually appear
to believe that they can reshape the universe to their
liking. From Hysterica
Passio by Chris Floyd:

Now we come at last to the heart
of darkness. Now we know, from their own words, that
the Bush Regime is a cult -- a cult whose god is Power,
whose adherents believe that they alone control reality,
that indeed they create the world anew with each act
of their iron will. And the goal of this will -- undergirded
by the cult's supreme virtues of war, fury and blind
faith -- is likewise openly declared: "Empire."

You think this is an exaggeration?
Then heed the words of the White House itself: a
"senior adviser" to the president,
who, as The New York Times reports, explained the
cult to author Ron Suskind in the heady pre-war days
of 2002.

First,
the top Bush insider mocked the journalist and all
those "in what we call the reality-based community,"
i.e., people who "believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernible reality."Suskind's attempt to defend
the principles of reason and enlightenment cut no
ice with the Bush-man. "That's not the way the
world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality," he said.
"And while you're studying that reality, we'll
act again, creating other new realities, which you
can study too, and that's how things will sort out.
We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will
be left to just study what we do." [...]

Bush and his gang are history's actors, and the rest
of us are just along for the ride to study what they
do. The advisor's comments sound like something Hitler
might have said to his biographer. We are informed that
a judicious study of discernible reality presents no
solutions. The Neocons and Zionists in control of the
American Empire act, and reality is created.

Talk about wishful thinking...

Reality is what it is. Contrary to the views expressed
by the mysterious senior Bush official, there IS a discernible
reality, and studying it can be quite useful. In fact,
this is why we create the Signs page each day. It is
not surprising that someone who believes in creating
his own reality would declare that observing reality
as objectively as possible is useless - if one does
exactly that, one discovers the reality of the delusional
thinking of those in power.

Each person that believes in the lies and propaganda
of the Bush administration reinforces the fairytale.
Ultimately, it appears that the whole charade will not
end until enough people stand up and declare in no uncertain
terms that they've had enough of the fairytale reality
that they have allowed to blind them from the truth.

WASHINGTON - FBI Director Robert
Mueller told Congress on Tuesday that people from countries
with ties to al-Qaida have crossed into the United States
from Mexico, using false identities.

"We are concerned, Homeland Security is concerned
about special interest aliens entering the United States,"
Mueller said, using a term for people from countries
where al-Qaida is known to be active.

Under persistent questioning from Rep. John Culberson,
R-Texas, Mueller said he was aware of one route that
takes people to Brazil, where they assume false identities,
and then to Mexico before crossing the U.S. border.

He also said that in some instances
people with Middle Eastern names have adopted Hispanic
last names before trying to get into the United States.

Mueller provided no estimate of the number of people
who have entered the country in this manner. [...]

In recent congressional testimony, Adm. James Loy,
deputy Homeland Security secretary, said al-Qaida operatives
believe they can pay to get into the country through
Mexico and that entering illegally is "more advantageous
than legal entry."

But Loy said there's no conclusive
evidence that al-Qaida operatives have entered the country
via Mexico.

Likewise, Mueller did not acknowledge
that terrorists had entered the country through Mexico,only that it's believed people
from countries where al-Qaida is active have done so.
[...]

Twenty-three-year-old, Houston-born
American citizen Ahmed Omar Abu Ali has been
returned to Virginia after twenty months in solitary
confinement in a Saudi Arabian prison. But he returned
only to face arraignment, on February 22, in U.S. District
Court in Alexandria, Virginia.

The charge is that he conspired to commit terrorism
- and, indeed, the FBI says that he admitted as much
in the course of interrogations in Saudi prison. He
is alleged to have plotted to assassinate President
Bush--but is not charged with that conspiracy.

The case is far from as open-and-shut as the FBI might
suggest. Indeed, a number of aspects of the prosecution
are deeply troubling.

The Early History of Abu Ali's Case: The Government
Reverses Itself

At the end of the 2003 academic year at the Saudi university
he was attending, Abu Ali failed to return home to the
U.S. As a result, his family--Jordan-born, naturalized
U.S. citizens living in Northern Virginia where I practice--contacted
me to see if I could help.

In August 2004, attorneys filed suit in the U.S. District
Court of the District of Columbia, on behalf of Abu
Ali's parents, in order to obtain his release. Among
the attorneys was renowned constitutional rights scholar
and Georgetown University law professor David Cole.

The day the suit was filed, the State
Department--which had previously refused to provide
information to Abu Ali's parents--notified them that
their son would be charged with crimes of terrorism
in Saudi Arabia. But that never happened. Instead, the
question of whether Abu Ali could be returned to the
U.S. was litigated.

Before U.S. District Judge John Bates,
the government took the position that Abu Ali was far
too dangerous to ever be returned to the United States,
and that the reason was so serious that it could not
be disclosed even to the family's attorneys. In other
words, the government sought to proceed on secret evidence.

Then, the government reversed itself dramatically.
It transported Abu Ali to the United States itself--thus
mooting the question before Judge Bates of whether the
government could proceed upon secret evidence to block
his return.

In 2004, when Abu Ali's parents had been begging the
U.S. government to intervene, it had refused--claiming
it was up to the Saudis whether he was released. With
his return, however, it began to seem evident that the
Saudis had been holding Abu Ali with U.S. consent--indeed,
even at the U.S.'s behest. It now appears that
FBI agents had the Saudis remove Abu Ali from his university
class and take him to a Saudi facility for questioning
in the summer of 2003.

It also became apparent that
the U.S. could, all the time, have ensured Abu Ali's
return to the U.S. whenever it felt like it.
After all, federal prosecutors had, during this time,
extradited from Saudi Arabia to Alexandria another man
in Saudi custody who was alleged to be (and acquitted
of being) a terrorist and involved in the case of the
Alexandria 11.

Apparently, however, the U.S. had taken advantage of
this U.S. citizen's choice to attend school abroad,
to make sure he was held in prison there--where
torture would be permitted, and counsel would not be
provided. Indeed, unidentified sources have been
quoted in the Washington Post and New York Times as
saying that the government certainly would have preferred
to have left Abu Ali in Saudi Arabia.

It was only Judge Bates's interest in Abu Ali's case
that changed the government's mind. Laudably, Bates
was concerned--as we all should be -- about the potentially
indefinite imprisonment of a U.S. citizen, with the
U.S.'s consent, in a foreign prison where due process
is ignored and torture is common.

With Judge Bates perhaps unwilling to proceed against
Abu Ali in absentia, the government felt it had to bring
him home. To do so, they had to charge him with something--something
that would at least sound serious, even if the underlying
indictment (as I will explain below) fell far short
of the media headline. [...]

The Government Relies on a U.S. Citizen's Saudi-Prison
Confession

At the hearing on the bail motion, an FBI agent testified
that Abu Ali had confessed to Saudi officials that he
associated with persons involved with al-Qaeda, received
things of value from them, and talked with one or more
of them about how to assassinate President Bush, whether
by car bomb or shooting. (These persons are named in
the indictment as unindicted co-conspirators.) The government
also claims to have a videotape of this confession.

Abu Ali's attorneys argued that if Abu Ali indeed confessed,
he did so under extreme conditions of confinement--conditions
that included torture. Confessions under such circumstances
are not only deeply inhumane; they are also notoriously
unreliable.

They also pointed out that Abu Ali had repeatedly been
denied the right to an attorney. Abu Ali's parents had
asked the U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia -- who had
infrequently sent an employee to visit Abu Ali in prison
-- to provide their son with an attorney. They were
told the Saudis would not allow it. Accordingly,
no attorney ever met with Abu Ali while he was incarcerated
and doubtless tortured in Saudi Arabia. [...]

The Government Searches Abu Ali's Parents Home
pursuant to the USA PATRIOT

The government also admitted at the bail hearing that
it had secretly raided Abu Ali's parents' home in 2003--apparently
pursuant to the USA PATRIOT Act -- and found what it
deemed to be "radical" Islamic writings. It
also found a gun magazine--hardly unusual for Virginia.
[...]

In Abu Ali's case, the government was
able to use two arguably unconstitutional laws--the
USA PATRIOT Act, which allows secret, warrantless searches,
and the law the government invoked, which allows pre-trial
dangerousness to be presumed. Through the combination
of these laws, it was able to search secretly for supposed
evidence of dangerousness, craft an overblown indictment,
flood the media with dramatic press releases, and then
dare the defendant to prove his innocence.

The Government's Indictment: Where's the Conspiracy?

When the indictment was made available to the public,
it raised an even larger question about the entire prosecution.
Nowhere in the indictment is
Abu Ali tied to any terrorist event or action.
So what is his crime?

Plainly, there was not enough support for a charge
of conspiracy to assassinate President Bush. Conspiracy
requires an agreement, and an overt act in furtherance
of the agreement. Nothing in
the indictment suggests that Abu Ali either agreed to
attempt to assassinate Bush, or took any action as a
step to doing so.

So, instead, the indictment simply charges Ali with
having "associated" with alleged terrorists.
Specifically, it claims that he talked about wanting
to kill Bush with these persons, and that he received
money from one or more of them--for what purpose, it
is unclear.

The very reason that the law of conspiracy
requires an agreement and an overt act is to prevent
prosecutions like this one--based on alleged, vague
discussions that supposedly took place, but were never
acted upon.

What Abu Ali's Case Signifies for America and the
Rule of Law

The next development in the Abu Ali case may be a plea
agreement. The government's case is obviously weak,
and its evidence depends on conduct that many view as
unconstitutional--even appalling.

The government will be in the same bind it is in the
Zacarias Moussaoui case. There, it has successfully
argued that it cannot produce witnesses because they
are of such high intelligence value to the government
that they have to be kept in secret. It has also argued
that given that this is the case, the defendant can't
subpoena these witnesses because their appearance, pursuant
to Moussaoui's Sixth Amendment right to face his accusers,
would be a grave threat to national security.

If prosecutors offer Abu Ali a deal and he refuses,
he will sit in jail for years as the case winds it way
through appeal after appeal, as his occurred in the
Moussaoui saga.

If Abu Ali pleads guilty, he will no doubt be placed
under a gag order, like that imposed on John Walker
Lindh. It will require, most certainly, that he never
speak in public about anything related to the court
case, or about what happened to him while he was in
Saudi custody.

The plea agreement may also require that Abu Ali return
to Saudi Arabia--as the agreement the government entered
into with U.S. citizen Yaser Hamdi did--even though
that means he will be separated from his family. (The
agreement followed upon Hamdi's in his Supreme Court
case.) [...]

If Abu Ali's case does end in a plea
agreement--or, worse, in a precedent blessing this prosecution
as constitutional--Americans' rights will have been
very significantly diminished.

Such a result will mean that
this nightmare is viewed as an entirely legal reality:
The U.S. can work with a foreign government to arrest
and imprison a U.S. citizen and torture him. It can
allow the imprisonment to go on indefinitely; Abu Ali's
took over twenty months. [...]

But, readers may object, what if the U.S. really thinks
Abu Ali is a terrorist? The answer is that the U.S.
can still protect its citizens from him--consistent
with the Constitution.

How? The U.S. could have promptly extradited him from
Saudi Arabia to face charges here. Once he was here,
it could have honored his right, as a U.S. citizen,
to an attorney, a speedy trial, and a right to pretrial
release unless the government proved that he was a danger
or a flight risk.

This is not too much to ask. And it is what the Constitution
requires.

In Bushzarro world, where up is
down and logic is irrational, Bush nominates a man as
ambassador to the United Nations who believes there
is no United Nations. "There's no such thing as
the United Nations," John Bolton declared in 1994.
''If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10
stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.'' Like
the character Bizarro created by Otto Binder, Bolton
Bizarro has a brain apparently functioning at a level
of a kid -- or more accurately, Bolton Bizzaro operates
on the level of a playground bully minus Ritalin. [...]

Jesse Helms commented on Bolton's irrational bully-boy
stance when he told the neocon criminal organization,
the American Enterprise Institute, "John Bolton
is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at
Armageddon." Considering Bolton's take on international
treaties -- he never saw one he didn't want to send
through a paper shredder -- Armageddon may not be entirely
out of the question.

For Bolton Bizarro, as senior
vice president of the American Enterprise Institute,
the idea of international law, specifically the International
Criminal Court (ICC), is "a product of fuzzy-minded
romanticism [that] is not just naive, but dangerous."
So ecstatic was Bolton over the decision of the United
States to become an outlaw nation -- sending a letter
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on May 6, 2002 renouncing
the Rome Treaty, signed by Clinton on December 31, 2000
-- he told the Wall Street Journal it was "the
happiest moment of my government service." In
Bushzarro world, there is nothing wrong with the crime
of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and
the crime of aggression -- in fact, as the invasions
of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate, such crimes are
to be considered normal behavior between states.In renouncing the ICC, the United
States joined such enlightened nations as China, Iraq,
Libya, Yemen, Qatar, and Israel in refusing to abide
by the ICC. [...]

The number of Americans relying on political news from
the Internet grew sixfold between the 1996 and 2004 presidential
campaigns. This growth was achieved by a sharp drop in
the influence of newspapers.

Chicago Sun-Times reported that 18 % of American adults
cited the Internet as one of their two main sources of
news about the presidential races, compared with only
3 % in 1996. The reliance on TV
grew only slightly to 78 percent, up from 72 percent.

Meanwhile, the influence of newspapers dropped sharp
to 39 % last year, from 60 percent in 1996, according
to the joint, telephone-based survey from the Pew Research
Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Internet
and American Life Project.

Twenty-eight percent said they primarily used news pages
of AOL, Yahoo, Google News and other online services,
which carry dispatches from traditional news sources like
the AP and Reuters.

Comment:
Here we see the growing divide as the world moves towards
greater and greater polarisation between the force of entropy
and the force of creation. Those aligning with entropy are
getting more and more of their news from the television
while eschewing other forms of media. While the percentage
of those going to the Internet is increasing, almost one-third
(28%) are going to the mainstream media sites which means
that 13% of Americans are looking for their news outside
of the corporate and statist media.

OTTAWA - Radical groups
such as al-Qaeda have developed a strong command of the
internet, using it for everything from fundraising to recruiting,
according to the head of Canada's security service.

Jim Judd, who was appointed director
of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in November,
says Osama bin Laden's network has compensated for the
loss of its training camps in Afghanistan by using the
internet to run lucrative credit-card fraud schemes, publish
training manuals and recruit new fighters.

"Followers are recruited around the world, including
in our own country," Judd told a Senate committee
reviewing Canada's Anti-terrorism Act.

He said CSIS keeps tabs on more than 100 people it suspects
have links to terrorist groups. Increasingly, the names
on the watch list belong to young Muslim men, many of
them born in Canada as well as Europe and the United States.

The number of adherents to terrorism has grown since
al-Qaeda's attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001,
Judd said.

"We are encountering here and elsewhere individuals
who are native born in their country showing up as associates
or members of terrorist groups," he said.

Nearly 4,000 known Islamist websites

That trend is encouraged by nearly 4,000 Islamist websites
and chat rooms that can be found online at any given time.
They post everything from video clips of sermons by radical
imams to bomb-making manuals, intelligence officials say.

Rita Katz, head of an American institute that searches
for websites related to militant groups such as al-Qaeda,
says Islamic extremists have acquired highly trained experts
with a sophisticated knowledge of the internet.

"We have cases of people with PhDs in computers,
people who were employed by internet security companies,
people who are extremely familiar with the network,"
she said.

"When you have a U.S. passport [or] a Canadian passport,
you can move freely and no one will arrest you."

Comment:
Al Qaeda and the Internet. We all know where this is leading,
don't we? The need for more and more control over who uses
it and what content it is permitted to carry.

MADRID - Military strikes and draconian
measures against terrorists may create even more terror,
US-based academics warned at a summmit here as Spain
prepared to commemorate the one-year anniversary of
the deadly train bombings in the capital.

The experts said Europe could learn
from Washington's mistakes in this regard.

"Europe can learn from America's mistakes and
successes. Among the successes
was not to allow any religious group to dominate society.
But a strong militant stance may lead to more violence,"
said Mark Juergensmeyer, the director of international
studies at the University of California.

Comment: More
to the point, one of America's "successes"
was to use a religious group, fundamentalist
Christians, to help seize and maintain power and control.
Technically, Juergensmeyer's statement is correct in
that the fundies do not dominate society; their ardent
faith is simply being used as a tool by the powers that
be to control everyone. The fundamentalists are being
hoodwinked with tales of the "end times" and
floating up to heaven on a cloud to meet Jesus, while
all the heathens are "left behind". To the
fundies, Bush is their savior in that he is seen as
fulfilling the prophecy, so to speak. At the same time,
a male prostitute named James
Guckert - one man in a long line of homosexual
prostitutes linked to the Bush family and the Republican
party - who is good buddies with someone in the
Bush administration is allowed to pretend to be a White
House reporter even though he has basically zero credentials.

He was speaking to the press on the first day of a
summit marking the anniversary of the March 11, 2004
Madrid train bombings, where several delegates pointed
to the dangers of the "war on terror" led
by the United States.

Juergensmeyer said the US military's
detention of Islamic militants captured in Afghanistan
as "prisoners of war" at Guantanamo Bay had
exacerbated the threat of extremism.

"We have the Guantanamo
effect. That is dealing with terror in such a way that
it has an incubator effect. One has to examine the penal
system's role in creating more terrorism," Juergensmeyer
said. [...]

Louise Richardson, the dean of the Radcliff Institute
at Harvard, said she opposed the US-led war "on
Iraq precisely because I feared that it would have this
effect.

"The US government has
done a lot of things in response to terrorism that it
may regret," she said. [...]

Comment: Unless
there were no real terrorists to begin with, and then
the Bush administration's actions make perfect sense...
Don't have an enemy? Make one! Bush himself may be just
a mindless cowboy, but the brains behind him - like
Karl Rove - are extremely cunning.

Praising the response of the Spanish government, which
is holding 23 suspects for the bombings, she
said Europe and the United States dealt with terrorism
"differently" though sharing the same aims.

Some 200 delegates, including UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan and about 20 heads of state and goverment
are meeting in Madrid over four days to search for a
democratic response to terrorism.

The summit is organised by the Club of Madrid, a group
of ex-government leaders, whose president Fernando
Enrique Cardoso urged here that no measure to fight
terrorism breach international law.

Comment: Oops!
Too late.

"Sometimes resorting to force is necessary but
it must strictly adhere to international law. Sometimes
the effect of military force is counterproductive,"
he said.

US billionaire financier George Soros,
who is also attending the summit, on Tuesday told Spanish
radio that Washington's strategy was dangerous because
it had sparked anger around the world.

"In Iraq," he said, "there are more
people wanting to kill Americans than there were before.

"These people didn't think like that before the
Americans arrived and did what they did. The
attitude of creating innocent victims creates terrorists.
It's as simple as that." [...]

Lee, ex-Irish president and UN rights chief Mary Robinson
and former president of Cape Verde, Antonio Mascharenhas
Monteiro, who briefed reporters on the sidelines of
the conference, all underlined the need for democratic
standards in fighting terrorism. [...]

She singled out the United States for
taking draconian measures against terror suspects, detaining
some without trial at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba following
the conflict in Afghanistan, in Washington's attempt
to prosecute a global "war on terror."

And she warned that democracies, had,
in seeking to combat terrorism, to address the root
causes of terrorism, the "anger, frustration and
despair" of groups who perceive themselves as marginalised.

Cape Verde's Monteiro for his part warned against accepting
religion as an "excuse" for fomenting terrorist
violence.

"Violence can never be an option for religion.
Religion preaches love, tolerance and harmony,"
he said, warning against false "interpretations"
of religious doctrines.

"We must combat poverty. The rich countries bear
an enormous responsibility here," Monteiro said,
while echoing Robinson's warning on abuses within a
democracy.

Comment: It
seems there are two definitions of terrorism. First,
there is the terrorism conducted by numerous independent
groups that has plagued many European countries for
years. In dealing with such violent groups, Europe has
not yet cracked down on civil liberties the way that
the US has in the war on terror. There appears to be
an understanding among European governments that limited
increases in security and containment are the best ways
to fight violent groups. There is a realisation that
responding to violent acts with yet more violence only
results in a descending spiral that can only lead to
chaos. In contrast, the US war on terror, centered around
the Mossad/CIA-created al-Qaeda group, has essentially
been an excuse to satisfy the imperial ambitions of
the Neocons and their Zionist counterparts. While the
recent meeting in Spain on the subject of terrorism
may appear to be a more constructive approach to the
matter, none of the attendees wanted to really make
a distinction between "terrorist" groups committing
acts of violence and the invented terrorism that is
the tool of those who wish to dominate and control through
fascist measures.

WASHINGTON - A presidential commission
investigating prewar intelligence about Iraq's weapons
has concluded that U.S. data on Iran's arms is "inadequate,"
The New York Times reported on Tuesday, citing people
who have been briefed on the panel's work.

In a report to President Bush later
this month, the panel will describe American intelligence
on Iran "as inadequate to allow firm judgments
about Iran's weapons program," the newspaper reported
in an article posted on its Web site.

A spokesman for the nine-member commission declined
direct comment on the New York Times report.

"The report itself isn't complete yet and the
full details will be presented to the president,"
spokesman Larry McQuillan said.

Bush accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons
and called it part of an "axis of evil." Tehran
insists its nuclear program is intended solely to generate
electricity.

The New York Times report said
one person who described the panel's deliberations and
conclusions characterized American intelligence on Iran
as "scandalous" given the importance and relative
openness of the country, compared to North Korea.
[...]

"Iran is not after developing nuclear arms or mass
killing weapons, and I recommend the US not to terrify
the world with hollow allegations," Rowhani was quoted
as saying on Monday evening.

"Iran, as a principle not in need of any forms
of nuclear bombs, was not a lover of adventurism and never
intended to enter wars with any country," Rowhani
said, adding that the Iranian nation would confront any
threats and resist any attacks.

However, the negotiator underlined that Iran needed
new sciences, advanced technology and nuclear energy for
its infrastructure and construction projects.

The United States accused Tehran of developing nuclear
weapons secretly and urged to refer Iran's nuclear case
to the UN Security Council.

TEHRAN, March 8 (Xinhuanet)
-- Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh announced
here Tuesday that Iran has discovered two new oil and gas
fields in the south of the country.

The new oil field, with an estimated capacity of 5.7
billion barrels, was located in the southern province
of Khuzestan, 40 km northeast of the provincial capital
of Ahvaz, Zanganeh told reporters.

"The field also holds 242 billion cubic meters
of gas, of which 36 billion cubic meters are recoverable,"
he said.

Zanganeh said that the gas field is situated east of
the great South Pars gas field in another southern province
of Bushehr and the capacity is estimated at 168 billion
cubic meters of gas and 183 million barrels of gas condensate.

The minister added that the oil field belonged solely
to Iran while the gas field was shared with another country.

Iran previously boasted that it has 132 billion barrels
of oil and 26,800 billion cubic meters of gas in proven
reserves, both at the second in the global list.

JERUSALEM, March 8 (Xinhuanet)
-- Israel plans to phase out Palestinian labor by 2008,
the head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Tuesday.

Israel made the decision in response to more than four
years of fighting with the Palestinians, IDF chief Moshe
Yaalon told a security conference, Ha'aretz reported.

"Our goal is to stop any kind of Palestinian working
in Israel by 2008. This is our policy, this is our political
directive and this is because of what has happened here
over the last four and a half years," Yaalon said.

However, Israel will allow goods to flow freely through
Israel's borders with the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a
military official saidon condition of anonymity.

Before the outbreak of violence in 2000,
more than 150,000 Palestinian workers were in Israel,
most in menial jobs Israelis refused to fill.

Palestinian economy has traditionally relied heavily
on work in Israel. During the recent violence when workers
were barred from entering Israel, unemployment in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip skyrocketed, leading to high
poverty rates.

Comment:
Israel's goal is to cut off the "unclean" Palestinians
from any contact with the Israelis: force them into small
enclaves, surround those enclaves with the apartheid wall,
control the checkpoints to make travel as difficult as possible,
and, finally, lock the doors and throw away the key before
letting lose the ethnic
specific weapons.

ROME (Reuters) - Italy's
foreign minister rejected Tuesday a U.S. account of how
its forces killed an Italian intelligence agent in Iraq
and urged Washington to punish any soldiers found guilty
of wrongdoing in the shooting.

Agent Nicola Calipari has been hailed as a hero in Italy
after he died shielding a newly freed hostage from U.S.
gunfire as they drove to Baghdad airport last Friday.

The killing has strained ties between the United States
and Italy, which has been one of President Bush's staunchest
allies in Europe over the war in Iraq.

Fini dismissed speculation that U.S. forces deliberately
fired on the Italians, but he said a U.S. military statement
on the incident appeared to be at odds with what actually
happened.

"It was certainly an accident, an accident caused
by a series of circumstances and coincidences," Fini
said.

"But this doesn't mean, in fact it makes it necessary,
to demand that events are clarified ... to identify those
responsible, and if people are to blame then to request
and ensure that the guilty parties are punished,"
he added.

The U.S. military has said its soldiers fired on the
Italians' car after it approached a checkpoint at speed
and failed to heed signals to slow down.

But in a detailed reconstruction, Fini insisted that
the Italians had been driving slowly and had received
no warning.

APOLOGY

Fini said that immediately after the shooting, U.S. soldiers
had apologized profusely to freed hostage Giuliana Sgrena
and an unnamed Italian intelligence officer who survived
the fire.

"The government has a duty to point out that the
reconstruction of the tragic event that I have set out
... does not coincide totally with what has been said
so far by the U.S. authorities," Fini said.

President Bush has promised an investigation. In previous
"friendly-fire" deaths, the Pentagon has not
publicly admitted to any culpability on the part of U.S.
forces.

Italy deployed 3,000 troops to Iraq following the fall
of Baghdad and has made clear that it will not withdraw
its troops despite Calipari's death. But it fears any
hint of a U.S. whitewash over the incident will fuel anti-American
sentiment.

Sgrena, an award-winning journalist who was held hostage
for a month in Iraq before Calipari masterminded her release,
has suggested the Italians were fired at because the United
States opposes Rome's practice of negotiating with kidnappers.

The White House has rejected that suggestion.

FATAL MISSION

The Islamic militant group that held Sgrena hostage said
in a tape released Tuesday that they had rejected offers
of a ransom for her release. Italian newspapers have reported
that between $6 million to $8 million was handed over
by Italy.

Fini Tuesday gave a long account of Calipari's fatal
mission to Baghdad but made no mention of any ransom.
He said Rome had never considered a military swoop to
free Sgrena for fear such an operation would endanger
her life.

He said Calipari arrived in Baghdad Friday afternoon
after establishing contact with the kidnappers. He checked
in with U.S. authorities at the airport before driving
off with an Italian colleague to meet an Iraqi middleman.

The middleman took them to Sgrena, who was seated in
the wreckage of a car, dressed in black robes and wearing
a mask.

On the drive back to the airport, the Italians left the
lights on in the car to help identify them to U.S. checkpoints.

As they neared the airport, the car slowed to about 40-km/h
because the road was wet and because the driver had to
make a sharp turning. Half way around the curve, a searchlight
picked out the car and guns opened fire for 10-15 seconds,
Fini said.

The intelligence officer who survived the attack was
forced to kneel in the road until the soldiers realized
who he was.

Comment:
While the two recounting of the facts last Friday evening
in Baghdad are impossible to reconcile, the photos released
today by RAI in Italy of the car in which Giuliana Sgrena
and Nicola Calipari were traveling add to the confusion.
The only bullet hole in the car was through the windshield,
at least on the pictures available. Whether more will be
found we must wait to discover. However, it does appear
that if the US forces fired many hundreds of rounds, they
are either not very good shots, or they were firing into
the air. Is the bullet hole through the windshield a stray
bullet, or the shot of an expert marksman who was told to
take out one of the passengers?

Unrelenting US pressure
on Cuba, set to ratchet up again at next week's UN human
rights commission meeting in Geneva, is testing relations
between the Bush administration and a new generation of
centre-left Latin American leaders.

As it has done each year since the early 1990s, the US
will urge the commission to adopt a resolution condemning
Cuba's human rights record. And Cuban officials predict
that the US will again use "arm-twisting and threats"
to get its way.

Republican attacks on President Fidel Castro's communist
government intensified during last year's American election
campaign. The treasury secretary, John Snow, tightened
the 42-year-old US embargo and vowed to "bring an
end to the ruthless and brutal dictatorship".

But George Bush's victory has not eased the pressure
- rather the reverse. A Republican-led congressional committee
gave a platform to Cuban dissidents last week to publicise
Cuba's "atrocious" behaviour. Porter Goss, the
CIA chief, recently described Cuba (and Venezuela) as
a source of regional instability.

New US rules, effective this month, will create more
obstacles to American food sales to Cuba, affecting staples
such as rice, wheat, soybeans and dried milk, in addition
to the tougher curbs on commerce, visas and travel.

The US devotes an estimated $36m annually to encouraging
political change in Cuba, employing the "soft power"
tactics successfully used in eastern Europe.

But according to Abelardo Moreno, Cuba's deputy foreign
minister, the latest US moves could foreshadow more muscular
intervention.

"US officials are publicly speaking of regime change
in Cuba. They were already attacking us as sponsors of
terrorism. Now we are told we are an 'outpost of tyranny',"
Mr Moreno said in London on Monday.

"We do not discount the possibility of military
action against Cuba. The administration has to prepare
public opinion. So human rights are being used. If the
[UN] resolution is adopted, it will be extremely dangerous,
more so than in previous years."

Mr Moreno described the peaceful opposition as "mercenaries"
in the pay of the US. But Christine Chanet, the UN commission's
Cuba envoy, offered a different perspective last week.

Ms Chanet deplored Cuba's detention of 61 dissidents,
first jailed in 2003, and the continuing arrest, disproportionate
sentencing and intimidation of non-violent political opponents.

Human Rights Watch's 2004 report said that "the
Cuban government systematically denies its citizens basic
rights to free expression, association, assembly, movement
and a fair trial".

The EU, which fell out with Cuba over the 2003 arrests,
still has misgivings, despite a rapprochement promoted
by Britain and Spain. The Foreign Office minister Bill
Rammell raised human rights concerns during a visit to
Havana yesterday.

Yet for all its failings, and disconcertingly for the
US, Cuba's government is steadily strengthening ties with
its Latin American neighbours.

Recently installed leaders in Argentina, Chile, Brazil
and Venezuela were raised in the leftwing, activist tradition
of the 1970s and 1980s. For them, Che Guevara is more
than a romantic character in a motorcycle road movie,
and Cuba's revolution is deserving of their protection.

While following a broadly pragmatic line these days,
all oppose Washington's embargo as much as they opposed
the US-driven, neo-liberal free market policies blamed
for Latin America's economic woes.

And Uruguay's new socialist leader, Tabare Vazquez, has
restored full diplomatic relations. He revealed that Cuba
was being considered for associate membership of the regional
trade bloc, Mercosur. If agreed, this could further upset
US plans for a "Free Trade Area of the Americas".

Mr Moreno evidently relishes Cuba's changing fortunes.
"We feel very much more comfortable than before,"
he said. This, of course, is the opposite of what the
US intends. While Mr Bush is busily remaking the Middle
East in America's image, he may be losing the plot in
his backyard.

Comment:
The US is upset with Castro because he has had the gall
to stand up to Yankee imperialism for forty-five years.
He refuses to submit no matter how many troops, spies, and
assassins have been sent to Cuba. The bloc of countries
in Latin America is a bad example for the rest of the world,
as was the democratically elected government of Salvadore
Allende in Chile. And we know what happened to Allende.
The world saw what the US means by "democracy".

Hizbullah's call for
a huge pro-Syrian demonstration in Beirut was answered
by hundreds of thousands of protesters on Tuesday. The
largely Shiite crowds were huge compared to the smaller
anti-Syrian demonstrations held for the past week.

The anti-Syrian protesters had mostly been Christians,
with some Druze and Sunnis. But Lebanon is probably only
now 20 percent Maronite Christian (the most anti-Syrian
group), and may be as much as 40 percent Shiite.

The simplistic master narrative constructed by the partisans
of President George W. Bush held that the January 30 elections
were a huge success, and signalled a turn to democracy
in the Middle East. Then the anti-Syrian demonstrations
were interpreted as a yearning for democracy inspired
by the Iraqi elections.

This interpretation is a gross misunderstanding of the
situation in the Middle East. Bush is not pushing with
any real force for democratization of Saudi Arabia (an
absolute monarchy) or Pakistan (where the elected parliament
demands in vain that General Pervez Musharraf take off
his uniform if he wants to be president), or Tunisia (where
Zayn Ben Ali has just won his 4th unopposed term as president),
etc. Democratization is being pushed
only for regimes that Bush dislikes, such as Syria or
Iran. The gestures that Mubarak of Egypt made (officially
recognized parties may put up candidates to run against
him, but not popular political forces like the Muslim
Brotherhood) are empty.

In fact the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections
were deeply flawed. 42 percent of the electorate did not
show up. The elections could only be held by locking down
the country for 3 days, forbidding all vehicular traffic
to stop car bombings. The electorate had no idea for whom
they were voting, since the candidates' names were secret
until the last moment. The Sunni Arabs boycotted or were
prevented from voting by the ongoing guerrilla war, which
started right back up after the ban on traffic lapsed.

The Lebanese have been having often lively
parliamentary election campaigns for decades. The idea
that the urbane and sophisticated Beirutis had anything
to learn from the Jan. 30 process in Iraq is absurd on
the face of it. Elections were already scheduled in Lebanon
for later this spring.

Moreover, the anti-Syrian protests were not a signal
that the Lebanese wanted to be like American-occupied
Iraq. They were a signal that the Druze, Maronites and
a section of the Sunnis had agreed to try to push Syria
out. It was the US who had invited Syria into Lebanon
in 1976. And it was a sign that Lebanon is still deeply
divided, since the Shiite plurality largely supports Syria.
Given the pro-Syrian sentiment in some Sunni cities like
Tripoli, it may well be that a majority of Lebanese want
Syria to remain in some capacity. If that were true, what
would it do to Mr. Bush's master narrative of the march
of democracy?

The main exhibit for the relevance of Iraq to Lebanon
is Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt's statement to the Washington
Post: "It's strange for me to say it, but this process
of change has started because of the American invasion
of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the
Iraqi people voting, eight million of them, it was the
start of a new Arab world."

It is highly unlikely that Jumblatt is sincere in this
statement. He has seen Lebanese vote for parliament several
times, and has campaigned, and Iraq was nothing new to
his experience (like Lebanon, it is occupied by a foreign
military power even during its elections).

It is worth recalling Jumblatt's stance on Iraq and Paul
Wolfowitz (for more on whom, see below):

November 19, 2003

US annuls visa for Lebanese politician who regretted
Wolfowitz survived

BEIRUT, Nov 19 (AFP)

A leading Lebanese politician said Wednesday his US
visa had been annulled after he expressed regret that
US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was unhurt
in a Baghdad rocket attack.

Walid Jumblatt, an MP who is leader of Lebanon's Druze
community, told AFP he had "received from the US
embassy in Beirut a letter saying that the visa -- valid
until 2007 -- has been cancelled" . . .

According to a letter sent by the US State Department
to Jumblatt and published by Al-Mostaqbal newspaper,
the visa was withdrawn as it "cannot be given to
a foreigner who uses a privileged position to express
his support for terrorist activity, tries to convince
others of such support or supports a terrorist organisation."

On October 27, Jumblatt described Wolfowitz as a "microbe"
in comments that were described as "unacceptable"
by the United States but were not condemned by the Lebanese
government.

"We hope the firing will be more precise and
efficient (next time), so we get rid of this microbe
and people like him in Washington who are spreading
disorder in Arab lands, Iraq and Palestine," Jumblatt
said.

One US soldier was killed and 17 other people were
wounded in late October when a volley of rockets was
fired at the Rashid hotel in Baghdad that houses US
military and other staff and where Wolfowitz had been
staying.

But despite the cancellation of his visa, Jumblatt
remained defiant on Wednesday.

"I am sticking to my position, I refute ... America's
imperialist policy," he told France's RFI radio
in an interview.

He also accused the United States of causing "chaos"
in Iraq and putting a "puppet government"
in place in Baghdad.

"They (the United States) will now continue the
repression of the Iraqi people who are rejecting them,"
he added."

I guess now that Jumblatt sees a way of getting the Syrians
out of Lebanon by allying with Bush, all of a sudden America
is no longer an imperialist cause of chaos. People who
want to believe that remind me of PT Barnum's dictum that
one is born every minute.

Comment:
We wonder what deal was made behind closed doors to change
Jumblatt's mind? Secrecy. Deals made by politicians and
hidden from the population that elected them. This is
democracy, Western style. Until there are no more secrets,
until all negotiations between peoples are carried out
in the light of day, there will be no freedom, there will
be no democracy. As long as national security comes before
truth, there will be no freedom, there will be no democracy.

Government of the people, for the people, and by the
people means that the people get to vote once every few
years in rigged elections -- rigged either through the
voting or by putting up candidates who express the same
ideas in different words to fool the voters into believing
their politics are different. The people's input ends
in the ballot box. There is no discussion of policy, no
dialogue or give and take, outside of backroom deals in
the halls of parliament. By voting for representatives,
the people exclude themselves from power. But direct democracy,
or government through referendum, is no better. When the
population is ignorant or apathetic, they do not have
the knowledge necessary to decide for themselves. By imposing
a school system that crushes independent thought and critical
thinking, a cowed populace is formed which can be acted
upon without any negative reactions.

But until the very stuff of mankind is changed through
inner work on the self, a population capable of leading
itself will not come into existence. As such work can
not be imposed from above, but must come from an internal
recognition of its necessity, it falls outside of the
purview of any political party. In other words, our lot
as a species is hopeless; we can only liberate ourselves
as individuals, one by one.

What are the chances of such liberation outracing the
madness sweeping the globe under the Bush Reich?

HANOI, March 9 (Xinhuanet)
-- Despite facing a bumpy road ahead, the lawsuit against
37 US defoliant producers by Vietnamese Agent Orange victims
-- the poorest among the poor, the most miserable among
the miserable -- will bring about justice to them.

"The suit is not only for the life of Vietnamese
Agent Orange victims, but also for the legitimate rights
of all victims in many other countries, including the
United States. The suit is conducted because we believe
that conscience and justice are stillrespected in this
earth," Dang Vu Hiep, president of the Vietnam Agent
Orange Victims' Association (VAVA), told Xinhua on Wednesday.

According to studies of US scientists,
the US army forces dropped some 80 million litters of
defoliants, mostly Agent Orange,which contained nearly
400 kilograms of dioxin, an extremely toxic substance,
to Vietnam between 1961 and 1971.

Among 4.8 million local people exposed
to the dioxin, 3 million are Agent Orange victims, many
of whom, and even their children and grandchildren suffer
from cancer and genetic deformities, Hiep noted.

"Tens of thousands of people have
died in agony. Many women either have been unable to have
babies or given birth to deformed children. Millions of
people, including their children and grandchildren, are
now living with diseases and in poverty due to cruel aftermaths
of the Orange Agent spraying," he said.

To help Agent Orange victims overcome their painful
experiences,the Vietnamese government as well as the international
community has offered them both spiritual and practical
support. The government has recently raised the level
of financial allowances to the victims, while foreign
countries, individuals and organizations from France,
Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, South Korea, Japan,
Australia, Brazil and Chile among others, Hiep said.

Len Aldis, secretary of the Britain-Vietnam Friendship
Society,has received nearly 700,000 signatures from many
countries after placing a petition in support of Vietnamese
Agent Orange victims on the Internet. He has already set
letters to US President George Bush and UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan to seek support for the victims.

"In 1984, American veterans of
the Vietnam War took the chemical companies which manufactured
Agent Orange to court. The companies settled by paying
a sum of 180 million US dollars. Today, in a court in
New York, the city that is also home to the building of
the United Nations, a lawsuit has begun, brought by three
Vietnamese seriously affected by Agent Orange. This lawsuit
also speaks for the 3 million victims in Vietnam. The
lawsuit may take a number of years before a judgment is
reached," says the letter sent to Kofi Annan.

An international conference on the effects of the use
of Agent Orange in Vietnam is to take place on March 11-12
in Paris, which will draw greater attention of the international
community. "Via the conference, more people around
the world will have concrete actions to assist the victims
and strongly support their lawsuit against US chemical
producers," Hiep said.

On Jan. 30, 2004, three Vietnamese Agent Orange victims
brought the suit against 37 US companies that produced
defoliants to the US district court in Brooklyn, New York.
After much research of thousands of documents and legal
arguments, the lawsuit began on Feb. 28, 2005.

"People on planes which sprayed toxic chemicals
have been recognized that they are poisoned and infected
with diseases. So, there is no reason for people, who
had to receive the toxic on their head, ate and drank
food and water containing the toxic, won't receive the
same recognition. We believe that the lawsuit, withthe
wide support of the fair international community, including
the US public opinion, will certainly give us a victory,"
said Nguyen Thi Binh, VAVA honor chairwoman.

Comment:
Long before Saddam Hussein was "gassing his own people",
the US was using chemical agents on the civilian population
of Vietnam. The US is also the only country to have used
nuclear weapons against an enemy. Quite the record; something
to be proud of, to fight for across the sands and mountains
and oil fields of the Middle East.

The eruption of a super
volcano "sooner or later" will chill the planet
and threaten human civilization, British scientists warned
Tuesday.

And now the bad news: There's not much anyone can do
about it.

Several volcanoes around the world are capable of gigantic
eruptions unlike anything witnessed in recorded history,
based on geologic evidence of past events, the scientists
said. Such eruptions would dwarf those of Mount St. Helens,
Krakatoa, Pinatubo and anything else going back dozens
of millennia.

"Super-eruptions are up to hundreds
of times larger than these," said Stephen Self of
the United Kingdom’s (U.K.) Open University.

"An area the size of North America
can be devastated, and pronounced deterioration of global
climate would be expected for a few years following the
eruption," Self said. "They could result in
the devastation of world agriculture, severe disruption
of food supplies, and mass starvation. These effects could
be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilization."

Self and his colleagues at the Geological Society of
London presented their report to the U.K. Government's
Natural Hazard Working Group.

"Although very rare these
events are inevitable, and at some point in the
future humans will be faced with dealing with and surviving
a super eruption," Stephen Sparks of the University
of Bristol told LiveScience in advance of Tuesday's announcement.

Supporting evidence

The warning is not new. Geologists in
the United States detailed a similar scenario in 2001,
when they found evidence suggesting volcanic activity
in Yellowstone National Park will eventually lead to a
colossal eruption. Half the United States will be covered
in ash up to 3 feet (1 meter) deep, according to a study
published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Explosions of this magnitude "happen
about every 600,000 years at Yellowstone," says Chuck
Wicks of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied the
possibilities in separate work. "And it's been about
620,000 years since the last super explosive eruption
there."

A super eruption is a scaled up version of a typical
volcanic outburst, Sparks explained. Each is caused by
a rising and growing chamber of hot molten rock known
as magma.

"In super eruptions the magma chamber is huge,"
Sparks said. The eruption is rapid, occurring in a matter
of days. "When the magma erupts the overlying rocks
collapse into the chamber, which has reduced its pressure
due to the eruption. The collapse forms the huge crater."

The eruption pumps dust and chemicals
into the atmosphere for years, screening the Sun and cooling
the planet. Earth is plunged into a perpetual winter,
some models predict, causing plant and animal species
disappear forever.

"The whole of a continent might be covered by ash,
which might take many years -- possibly decades -- to
erode away and for vegetation to recover," Sparks
said.

Yellowstone may be winding down geologically, experts
say. But they believe it harbors at least one final punch.
Globally, there are still plenty of possibilities for
super volcano eruptions, even as Earth quiets down over
the long haul of its 4.5-billion-year existence.

"The Earth is of course losing energy, but at a
very slow rate, and the effects are only really noticeable
over billions rather than millions of years," Sparks
said.

Human impact

The odds of a globally destructive volcano
explosion in any given century are extremely low, and
no scientist can say when the next one will occur. But
the chances are five to 10 times greater than a globally
destructive asteroid impact, according to the new British
report.

The next super eruption, whenever it occurs, might not
be the first one humans have dealt with.

About 74,000 years ago, in what is now Sumatra, a volcano
called Toba blew with a force estimated at 10,000 times
that of Mount St. Helens. Ash darkened the sky all around
the planet. Temperatures plummeted by up to 21 degrees
at higher latitudes, according to research by Michael
Rampino, a biologist and geologist at New York University.

Rampino has estimated three-quarters of the plant species
in the Northern Hemisphere perished.

Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University
of Illinois, suggested in 1998 that Rampino's work might
explain a curious bottleneck in human evolution: The blueprints
of life for all humans -- DNA -- are remarkably similar
given that our species branched off from the rest of the
primate family tree a few million years ago.

Ambrose has said early humans were perhaps pushed to
the edge of extinction after the Toba eruption -- around
the same time folks got serious about art and tool making.
Perhaps only a few thousand survived. Humans today would
all be descended from these few, and in terms of the genetic
code, not a whole lot would change in 74,000 years.

Sitting ducks

Based on the latest evidence, eruptions
the size of the giant Yellowstone and Toba events occur
at least every 100,000 years, Sparks said, "and it
could be as high as every 50,000 years. There are smaller
but nevertheless huge eruptions which would have continental
to global consequences every 5,000 years or so."

Unlike other threats to mankind -- asteroids, nuclear
attacks and global warming to name a few -- there's little
to be done about a super volcano.

"While it may in future be possible to deflect asteroids
or somehow avoid their impact, even science fiction cannot
produce a credible mechanism for averting a super eruption,"
the new report states. "No strategies can be envisaged
for reducing the power of major volcanic eruptions."

The Geological Society of London has issued similar warnings
going back to 2000. The scientists this week called for
more funding to investigate further the history of super
eruptions and their likely effects on the planet and on
modern society.

"Sooner or later a super eruption will happen on
Earth and this issue also demands serious attention,"
the report concludes.

The results of a CT
scan done on King Tutankhamun's mummy indicate the boy
king was not murdered, but may have suffered a badly broken
leg shortly before his death at age 19 - a wound that
could have become infected, Egypt's top archaeologist
said today.

Zahi Hawass announced the results of the CT scan about
two months after it was performed on Tut's mummy. Hawass
says the remains of Tutankhamun, who ruled about 3,300
years ago, showed no signs that he had been murdered -
dispelling a mystery that has long surrounded the pharaoh's
death.

"In answer to theories that Tutankhamun was murdered,
the team found no evidence for a blow to the back of the
head, and no other indication of foul play," according
to a statement released Tuesday by Egyptian authorities.

"They also found it extremely unlikely that he suffered
an accident in which he crushed his chest."

Hawass says some members of the Egyptian-led research
team, which included two Italian experts and one from
Switzerland, interpreted a fracture to Tut's left thighbone
as evidence that the king may have broken his leg badly
just before he died.

"Although the break itself would not have been life-threatening,
infection might have set in," the statement says.
"However, this part of the team believes it also
possible, although less likely, that this fracture was
caused by the embalmers."

LONDON, March 9 (IranMania)
- An earthquake jolted the town of Zarrin-Dasht in Fars
province, southern Iran, Tuesday evening. According to
Iran's Official News Agency (IRNA), it was measuring 4.2
on the open-ended Richter scale

The seismological base of Fars province, affiliated to
the Geophysics Institute of Tehran University recorded
the tremor at 22:38 local time (1908 GMT).

The epicenter of the quake was registered at 28/22 degree
latitude and 54/37 degree longitude in Zarrin-Dasht. The
tremble caused no damage, the report said.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa
(Reuters) - An earthquake in South Africa trapped 42 miners
when it collapsed some deep underground tunnels, gold mining
company DRDGOLD told Reuters.

"Some of the access tunnels have been closed by
fallen rock ... the guys are digging like mad at the moment
trying to get to them," spokesman Ilja Graulich at
gold mining company.

The quake measured 5.0 on the Richter scale and was felt
in Johannesburg at 12:16 p.m. It had its epicenter near
the town of Stilfontein, 97 miles southwest of Johannesburg,
experts at the Council for Geoscience in Pretoria said.

MOUNT ST. HELENS, Wash. - Mount
St. Helens released a towering plume of ash Tuesday,
its most significant emission in months but one that
seismologists did not believe heralded any major eruption.

The volcano has vented ash and steam since last fall,
when thousands of small earthquakes marked a seismic
reawakening of the 8,364-foot mountain.

Late afternoon television footage showed the plume
billowing thousands of feet into the air, then drifting
slowly to the northeast.

The ash explosion happened around 5:25 p.m., about
an hour after a 2.0 magnitude quake rumbled on the east
side of the mountain, said Bill Steele, coordinator
of the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network at the
University of Washington.

Steele said he did not believe the explosion had increased
the risk of a significant eruption and noted that recent
flights over the volcano's crater did not reveal high
levels of gases. [...]

BOSTON
- A late-winter storm lashed parts of the Northeast
with icy winds and frigid temperatures Tuesday, closing
Boston's airport, knocking out power to thousands of
homes and dumping at least 8 inches of snow in some
areas.

Whiteout conditions forced authorities to close Logan
International Airport after a number of flights were
canceled. Logan spokesman Phil Orlandella said the airport
planned to reopen early Wednesday.

Boston expected to receive 6 to 8 inches of snow by
Wednesday; the weather service said western suburbs
were already reporting 8 inches late Tuesday. Wind gusts
over 50 mph were creating
dangerous wind chills; minus 24 degree wind chills were
forecast for Worcester through Wednesday morning.

Scattered power outages caused by gusty winds left
about 22,000 utility customers without electricity.

In New Jersey, slick driving conditions caused scores
of highway wrecks. "I have more accidents than
I have troopers," state police Capt. Al Della Fave
said.

The state remained under a wind advisory. Winds reached
61 mph hour in northwest New Jersey, and 50
mph in Atlantic City.

The wintery conditions came only a
day after spring-like weather raised temperatures in
the Northeast into the 60s under clear, sunny skies.

In North Carolina, a line of strong thunderstorms rumbled
across the countryside with winds up to 70
mph, toppling trees, damaging buildings and cutting
electrical service to tens of thousands of homes.

At one point, more than 34,000 utility customers were
without power. [...]

A suspected tornado threw a large
pine tree into a home in Wilson County, punching a hole
in the roof.

The editor of Playgirl
has come "out" as a Republican. Since being
the editor of Playgirl is way more embarrassing, we're
not sure what the big deal is. Anyhow, we were interested
in her take on ideology in the bedroom: "The Democrats
of the Sixties were all about making love and not war
while a war-loving Republican is a man who would fight,
bleed, sacrifice, and die for his country. Could you imagine
what that very same man would do for his wife in the bedroom?"
Gee, great question. Plant a flag in her head? Frag her?